You want to optimize your website for search engines. What are the best tools to use?

1 Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing the words and phrases that your target audience uses to search for your products, services, or information. This helps you understand the intent, demand, and competition of your potential customers and create content that matches their needs and expectations. When doing keyword research, some of the best tools to use are Google Keyword Planner (free), Moz Keyword Explorer (paid), and Ubersuggest (freemium). Google Keyword Planner allows you to generate keyword ideas and get search volume and competition data. Moz Keyword Explorer offers more advanced features such as keyword difficulty, opportunity, potential, and organic click-through rate. Ubersuggest provides keyword ideas, search volume, cost per click, SEO difficulty, top-ranking pages for each keyword, as well as their SEO metrics.

2 Technical Audit

Technical audit is the process of checking and fixing the technical aspects of your website that affect its performance, usability, and crawlability. It helps to identify and resolve issues such as broken links, duplicate content, slow loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and security. Google Search Console is a free tool that can monitor and improve your website's presence on Google. Screaming Frog is a paid tool that crawls your website and provides a comprehensive report on its technical elements. GTmetrix is a free tool that analyzes your website's loading speed and performance. All of these tools provide valuable insights into how to optimize your website for better performance and faster loading.

3 Content Optimization

Content optimization is the process of making your website's content more relevant, engaging, and useful for your audience and search engines. It helps you rank higher for target keywords, satisfy user intent, and increase dwell time and conversions. To optimize your content, you can use tools such as Yoast SEO, Hemingway, and Grammarly. Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin that helps you set focus keywords, titles, meta descriptions, and URLs for each page or post. Hemingway is a free tool that highlights any sentences that are too long or complex and suggests simpler alternatives. Grammarly is a freemium tool that checks and corrects grammar, spelling, punctuation, and tone while offering suggestions on how to enhance your vocabulary and avoid plagiarism.

5 Performance Tracking

Performance tracking is the process of measuring and evaluating your website's SEO results and progress. This helps you understand how your website is performing in terms of traffic, rankings, conversions, and revenue. It also allows you to identify what is working and what needs improvement, so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly. To do this, you can use Google Analytics for free to track and analyze website traffic and behavior. Google Data Studio is another free tool that helps you create and share interactive dashboards and reports for your website's data. Additionally, SEMrush is a paid tool that helps track and compare your website's rankings and keywords with competitors'. It provides insights into their strategies such as keywords, backlinks, ads, and more.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?